“Street Sweeper”: A Cinematic Poem Short Film In Spain Directed By Rupert Walker (2016)

“Street Sweeper” is a Cinematic Poem Short Film of Professional Bike Rider Brandon Semenuk in Barcelona, Spain Featuring Excerpts of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 Speech ‘Street Sweeper’ Directed by Rupert Walker.

Filmed, Edited and Directed by: Rupert Walker

Music by: Snake Eyes (“The Earth and Arrow” – Instrumental)

Rider: Brandon Semenuk

Animation: Scott Waraniak

VFX: Dan Gaud

Audio: Keith White

Photography: Hector Saura

“Street Sweeper” (from “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life”)

by Martin Luther King Jr.

“What I’m saying to you this morning, my friends, even if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; (Go ahead) sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, “Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”

If you can’t be a pine on the top of a hill

Be a scrub in the valley—but be

The best little scrub on the side of the hill,

Be a bush if you can’t be a tree.

If you can’t be a highway just be a trail

If you can’t be the sun be a star;

It isn’t by size that you win or fail—

Be the best of whatever you are.

And when you do this, when you do this, you’ve mastered the length of life.”

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An Important Emerging Creative Short Film Genre.

"...underneath the young gray dawn,
a multitude of dense, white fleecy clouds,
were wandering in thick flocks along the mountains,
shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind." From "Prometheus Unbound" by Percy Bysshe Shelley